This workshop explores ekphrasis, the ancient art of responding to a visual experience with language. From John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts to contemporary hybrid forms, writers have long turned to ekphrasis to bridge what is seen and what is felt.
Drawing from the Museum of Christian Art’s remarkable Indo-Portuguese collection and from her novel Glass Bottom (Picador India, 2024), Sonali Prasad examines how objects, icons, and everyday artefacts become sites of poetic and narrative revelation.
Glass Bottom was named Picador India’s “literary debut of the year,” listed among The Telegraph India’s “Page Turners of 2024,” and shortlisted for the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award in the Debut (English) category. Several artefacts from MoCA’s collection found their way into the book’s fictional landscape, including Jesus “with a fisherman’s body”, Madonna as “Mary Mata in a sari,” a syncretic symbol of Indo-Portuguese devotion, and a humble confessional sieve that rescues at the science centre.
This session invites participants to look closely, to read objects as stories, and to imagine new worlds through the act of description, rediscovering faith, gender, and ecology through dialogue that connects Goa’s coastal sensibilities to wider artistic currents.
Date: 26th October, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM
Fee: INR 900 (inclusive of material)
Venue: Museum of Christian Art, Old Goa
To register, send us a message on WhatsApp at +918308805399
